“What’s with all the holes?” I asked, wiggling frozen toes inside my boots as we walked. “I thought there was only one pit.”
“There was one to start with,” he said, guiding me toward the gantry. “But years ago, when one of the dig teams got frustrated, someone got the bright idea to dig another hole, then tunnel through the ground from it to the first pit, to avoid the booby traps. You know about the flood tunnels?” Bowman glanced at me, and when I nodded, he continued. “When that didn’t work, they tried again. And again. Eventually, that dig went bankrupt and the people all left. With all the abandoned holes out here, everyone pretty much forgot which one was the important one.”
The Walmart bag smacked my thigh when I stopped walking to stare around at the maze of scattered holes and equipment. “You mean no one knows which one of these is the real pit?” Some of the holes were covered by broad, flat iron disks or boards of OSB, and others were left open like mouths in the ground, gaping in anticipation of a meal. Most likely, several of them had actually been fed over the years. In decades past, I’d heard of several deaths at the Oak Island money pit. A couple of people had drowned, and a few more had hit the bottom of the then-dry hole and been crushed by the fall.
“No. Not for sure, anyway,” Bowman said. “But Mr. Devich seemed pretty confident in his choice. We never even looked at any of the other holes. Just the one he wanted dug up. That one over there, toward the center.”
He pointed at the concrete-lined hole beneath the gantry. “Don’t ask me how Devich knows that’s the right one. He didn’t even ask the previous owner, though from what I’ve heard, that old coot would have been most likely to remember.”
I understood perfectly well why a man like Troy Devich would squander a knowledgeable resource like the previous owner of Oak Island. A man of Devich’s wealth, power, and connections in the Netherworld had the very best empaths at his disposal, any one of whom would know which hole was the real deal with little more than a glance and a moment to “feel” around with her eyes closed. The real pit would still retain echoes of past activity—a metaphysical record of things long gone, faded like an old photograph, but still clear enough to sense.
Nose cherry red now, Bowman veered through the snow toward the foreman’s trailer, and I followed, my empty hand held out to capture several doomed snowflakes. I watched as they melted on my skin, fascinated by how something so potent and so devastatingly cold, something with the power of death over those left exposed, could seem so very fragile in the slight warmth of my palm.
Like the snow, I was strongest in my own element. Unfortunately, there weren’t many shadows to be found on the dig site. Bright overhead lights drove them all into hiding, as if someone thought monsters couldn’t come out if the sun never went down.
Bowman unlocked his trailer and pushed the door open. “Mr. Devich didn’t seem to know what you’d need,” he said, tugging his hat lower on his head. “But I have just about everything in here. I also have access to the special harnesses the men use, but I wouldn’t suggest going into the pit. It’s not safe without the crew here to operate the equipment.”
“I’m sure that won’t be necessary.” I hadnointention of going into that hole. Not even if Devich promised to hand over the Gatekeeper bound and gagged.
“Be right back.” Bowman disappeared into his trailer and the light went on inside.
Shivering, I pulled a black knit hat from one pocket of my jacket and a matching pair of gloves from the other, donning them both as the foreman came back out with two long, heavy-looking flashlights.
My teeth chattered, and Bowman glanced at me in smug amusement. “Cold seeps right into you, doesn’t it?” he said. “I’ve been working this dig site for most of the last ten years, and I still can’t stand the snow. Didn’t bother us much at the pit, though, strange as that sounds. We were so intent on the job at hand, I guess.” He pulled the door shut and jogged down the steps into the snow. “Some guys were even working without their coats during that last week, digging, and pumping, and hauling in their flannel shirts with no gloves. Hell, I soaked more than one rag with sweat, myself, and I was only supervising.
“Cold enough now, though, isn’t it?” I scuffed my boot in a twelve-inch drift of snow. “Whose bright idea was it to do this in the middle of the Canadian cold snap, anyway?” I couldn’t imagine working up a sweat in the snow, no matter what I was doing.
Okay, maybe there wasoneway…
“Not mine,” Bowman shook his head, as if we shared a common misery. “I go where the money is.”
Don’t we all…I pulled my hat farther down over my forehead, wishing I’d brought earmuffs. And a couple of those shake-up chemical hand warmers.
“Here.” Bowman handed me a long black flashlight. I’d bought my own in Halifax, but his was bigger and probably more powerful, so I accepted it gratefully, slipping it into the Walmart bag next to my other supplies. Whoever said size doesn’t matter clearly wasn’t facing a big-ass hole in the ground armed with only a four-inch flashlight.
I fell into step behind Bowman, trying not to slip in the snow as I rounded a cluster of oil barrels and stepped over a rusted pipe. I’d come to Oak Island mainly to speak to the foreman and get his version of what happened, as well as to verify that the box actually made it onto the plane. But now that I was there, I couldn’t leave without sneaking a peek at the most infamous pit in the world.
We stopped in front of the rail system, swept mostly clear of snow by the wind. “What’s with the train tracks?” I asked, visually tracking their path to where they rounded a curve behind the foreman’s trailer.
“It’s a removal system.” Bowman stepped onto one of the wooden planks connecting the rails and kicked absently at a metal bar with one snow-crusted boot. “We have big rail carts to carry off the dirt as it’s removed from the hole.”
“What about that pipe?”
“Pumps water from the pit, but it’s not running now. We shut off everything but the lights after we loaded the crate onto the helicopter.” He stepped from one board to the next with no regard for the thin sheen of ice glistening on each one in the glare from the lights.
The plastic bag crinkled against my leg as I followed him to the edge of the concrete-rimmed hole, where Bowman stopped to look up at an ice-coated length of one-inch-thick steel cable suspended from the gantry. The huge hook attached to the cable dangled three feet above his head. If it fell, it would smash his skull like a watermelon under a mallet. And I would never get the information I had come for.
The box must have weighed a ton—literally—to require such thick a cable.
I stepped over the pipe where it climbed the side of the concrete lip before descending into the pit through a metal manhole cover. A fuckinghugemanhole cover. The pit was at least twelve feet across, and the disk covering it was easily four inches thick. “What does that thing weigh?”
“Ballpark?” Bowman rubbed his beard with one gloved hand. “Twelve thousand pounds.”
Shit. I dropped my plastic bag on the ground. This waswellbeyond the capability of my poor little crowbar.Super-strength would have beensomuch cooler than rapid healing.
“We thread the crane hook through the slats to lift the lid off,” Bowman added.
My gaze followed the steel cable up to the trolly hanging from a track on the underside of the massive gantry frame. “I don’t suppose you can just start that bitch up, huh?” Snow swirled from the ground around me as I stared at the operator’s booth at the far end of the crane. The icy breeze made my nose tingle and my eyes water. I blinked, and a drop rolled from each eye to freeze on my cheeks.
